Prompt: Triversen

William Carlos Williams invented a stanza and poem form he called the triversen. I have always liked William Carlos Williams who wrote both short poems ("The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just To Say" are almost too well known, anthologized, and taught) and epic poems such as Paterson. (Plus he is a Jersey boy like myself.) I like the triversen which allows you to write on any subject but within a structure.

A verset means “in one breath” and triversen means “three” so this is a triple verse stanza. It is a form but it is not formal.

Here are Williams' 3 simple rules.

1. Each stanza equals one complete sentence, and each sentence/stanza breaks into 3 lines. S, each line is a separate phrase in the sentence.
2. Williams wanted each line to have a variable foot of 2-4 beats per line.
3. In its pure form, he wanted the poem to be 6 stanzas (18 lines).

Each line can vary in length with two to four stressed syllables. No more than four because he hated iambic pentameter lines! He did not want to write in verse, but he also did not want his poetry to look or read like prose. He often used this stanza in poems that were not triversen but also in poems that follow the pure 18-line triversen form.

You can see this stanza used in Williams' "The Artist" which also uses some unusual spacing, indents, and no punctuation - though that is not required of the form. Our model poem for this prompt is his poem "On Gay Wallpaper."

The green-blue ground
is ruled with silver lines
to say the sun is shining.

And on this moral sea
of grass or dreams lie flowers
or baskets of desires.

Heaven knows what they are
between cerulean shapes
laid regularly round.

Mat roses and tridentate
leaves of gold
threes, threes and threes.

Three roses and three stems
the basket floating
standing in the horns of blue.

Repeating to the ceiling
to the windows
where the day.

Blows in
the scalloped curtains to
the sound of rain. 

Some of you might start with a single complete statement or observation that you break into three lines. But those breaks should be strategic - perhaps by phrases or where you want the reader to take a breath, or pause to ponder. His occasional wider spacing also emphasizes the thoughts or pauses.

Some people have suggested that Williams' triversen his "triversen" is the equivalent of the Japanese haiku or the three-line katauta in that each line is a connected idea for the statement in the first line.

Williams' poem longer poem, "January Morning," is an example of him using the stanza form mixed with other stanza forms. That poem begins:

I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them

and Wallace Stevens' "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself" uses the stanza and the six stanza structure, though it does not follow all three of Williams' rules. The poem begins:

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

Our April call for submissions is for pure triversen poems that follow all three of Williams' rules.   Deadline: April 30, 2023

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